Janani Subramanian
Post Identity
Editor’s Introduction
When I sent out the CFP for this issue, one of the
first responses I received was surprisingly vehement.
A professor sent this message via email:
Tell the drivers who are systematically pulled
over and racially profiled by the police that
race is now irrelevant. Who are these alleged
“critics and commentators?” Moreover,
considering your university affiliation, you
can just step outside campus and make a
quick empirical observation. Personally,
I find these academic exercises quite
ludicrous.
While I was initially taken aback by this response,
I realized later how much I appreciated such an
honest reaction; it was my proof that post-identity
was a provocative and timely topic that demanded
further exploration. As the essays in this issue
reveal, post-identity works as an excellent theoretical
starting point for re-examining identity within a
contemporary nexus of social, political, cultural and
economic contexts.
The prefix “post” has been used extensively
within academic circles, particularly to characterize
a historical period or artistic movement: postcolonialism, post-modernism, post-humanism, postfeminism. While on a surface level suggesting an
“after,” the above terms have come to represent much
more than a historical succession from period to
period; rather, the terms have generated controversy
about history itself – about the “befores” and the
afters” – and subsequently blurred straightforward
Post Identity
Janani Subramanian, editor, Spectator 30:2 (Fall 2010): 5-8.
trajectories of past, present and future. The concept
of post-identity, while debated for some time within
gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory,
and legal studies, among other fields, has not truly
entered the public lexicon until the recent election of
President Barack Obama.
Obama’s election to office was an undoubtedly
historic event, yet the frenzy surrounding his
campaign, election and presidency thus far has been
a fascinating glimpse into the American public’s
range of reactions and emotions towards race,
celebrity, politics and history. Politicians, pundits,
and public intellectuals have heralded Obama’s
election as a milestone in America’s racial history,
focusing specifically on the very recent (ongoing?)
history of civil rights struggles; for many, Obama’s
presidency stands as a symbol of true “post”-ness –
of race, of black suffering, of the long political battle
for recognition in the eyes of the American state.
Recent popular reflections on the changing nature
of race and racism have focused on the notion of
historical progress, a constant move towards better
(read: more equitable) times. As Matt Bai points
out in his New York Times article, “Post-Race: Is
Obama the End of Black Politics?,” while the older
generation of civil rights leaders faced a violent and
explicit kind of racism, their sons and daughters –
Obama’s generation – were subjected to much more
subtle jibes and taunts within white, middle-class
suburbia. Bai references a conversation he has with
Cory Booker, 39-year-old black mayor of Newark:
“There is a universality now to the middle-class
black experience, he told me, that should be instantly
5
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
recognizable to Jews or Italians or any other white
ethnic bloc that has struggled to assimilate.”1 One of
the popular stories circulated around blackness, then,
has been a narrative of assimilation, based on the idea
that blackness, like Irish identity, will soon blend into
the common fabric of being “American.” Looking
briefly at popular representations of blackness in
Hollywood film, for example, often reveals a similar
elision of blackness in favor of American identity.
Actor Will Smith has starred in six recent science
fiction blockbusters where he plays a lone black
protagonist who must break the rules to save humanity
(Independence Day (1996), Men in Black (1997), Men in
Black II (2002), I, Robot (2004), I Am Legend (2007),
and Hancock (2008)). While Smith is identified
as “black” in the world off-screen, his on-screen
characters disavow a relationship to black identity; his
everyman heroes suggest that in the futuristic worlds
occupied by Smith on-screen, “blackness” has been
seamlessly integrated in “humanity,” and fears of the
Other have been transferred to more explicit enemies,
such as robots or aliens.2 Smith’s characters suggest the
contradictions and complications involved in ignoring
race within fantastic worlds, while racial identity has
undeniably tangible and material consequences in
“reality.” It is no surprise that Obama identified Smith
as the most suitable candidate to star in the filmed
version of Obama’s life story.3
The “post” in the “post-racism” proposed by
public figures and popular culture does not signify
a revolutionary moment in identity politics, then,
but rather a tacked-on ending to a narrative that
is ongoing rather than finished, circular rather
than linear, and fractured rather than unified.
The unfinished business of identity reveals itself
continuously within current events; the recent furor
over state-issued bans of gay marriage, the perverse
and prejudiced negligence of particular communities
revealed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!”outburst during
Obama’s health care address, the continuation of a
gendered and raced glass ceilings in the American
work force, an economic crisis based on the sale of
subprime mortgages to low-income populations,
the sale of ethnic “designer drugs” that ignore social
and cultural contexts for illness – the list goes on
and on. What these moments collectively reveal are
the continuing struggles for power and recognition
being fought within politics, economics and science,
struggles that must be acknowledged and analyzed
before even entertaining utopian thoughts of a
world full of “posts.”
Within academia, the “post” of “post-identity”
is constantly troubled and challenged; the essays in
this collection reveal the ways that reading “post”
temporally, as “finished” or “over,” is a provocative
Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot (2004)
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SUBRAMANIAN
way of reconsidering contemporary uses and
abuses of marginalized identities. While critical
race theorists such as Paul Gilroy and Walter Benn
Michaels have been encouraging a theoretical and
sociological move away from “racial thinking,”4
more scholars are challenging the utopia suggested
by “post” and re-purposing it as an important critical
and analytical tool. For example, N. Katherine
Hayles’ work on posthumanism leads the author
not to the future(s) of human-technological fusion,
but rather to the past, to the history of cybernetics
and the distinctions between embodied and
disembodied information; Hayles’ work highlights
the changing role of human subjectivity in the face
of technology and its implications in contemporary
society.5 Building on Hayles’ scholarship, Alexander
Weheliye’s research into sound technologies and
black cultural production suggests a corrective to
cybertheory with “a posthumanism not mired in
the residual effects of white liberal subjectivity.”6
Scholars such as Judith Halberstam, Jennifer
Gonzalez, Tara McPherson, Anna Everett, Aihwa
Ong, Roopali Mukherjee, Martin Kevorkian, and
Kodwo Eshun continue to explore the possibilities
and consequences of “posts,” and the essays in this
issue further the dialogue within the fields of critical
race theory, queer theory, transnationalism, popular
music studies, and new media theory.
The collection begins with Marcia Dawkins’
“Mixed Messages: Barack Obama and Post-Racial
Politics,” where Dawkins looks closely at the “postrace” ideal, analyzing its contemporary popularity in
light of recent historical events. Dawkins goes on to
analyze the rhetoric used by President Obama in his
historic “A More Perfect Union” speech. Dawkins
concludes that both the language used by Obama
and his iconic mixed-raced status do not exclaim a
“post-race” moment, but rather open a meaningful
dialogue about race and racism in the United States.
The next essay, “Dignity, the Sacred, and the Ends
of Black Performance,” explores a different facet
of the “end” of blackness. Author Sarah Cervenak
examines the use of destruction and absence in the
work of two performance artists, William Pope L.
and Adrian Piper, and their creation of unique and
productive ways of approaching black representation.
The artists, using Kantian and Eastern philosophies,
explore the idea of “lack” as a way of re-claiming
racial dignity, where a theoretical destruction of
blackness becomes a form of performative activism
and an opportunity to criticize the social and
material objectification of black bodies.
Kristopher L. Cannon’s essay, “Cutting Race
Otherwise: Imagining Michael Jackson,” examines
the representation of a highly visible black body
– Michael Jackson’s – and the instability of racial
and gendered categories prompted by Jackson’s
constantly shifting racial identity. Cannon explores
the instability of racial visibility, particularly the
disjuncture between images of blackness and
whiteness and what these chromatic details imply
about identity in general. Cannon uses Jackson’s body
within his various music videos as a “transitional”
figure, one that slips in and out of blackness and
whiteness and exists on a cyborgian border between
artificial and natural, ultimately challenging the
emphases placed on visual signifiers of identity in
popular culture. Nadine Chan continues to examine
the instability of identity, this time of national
identity, within film by reading Danny Boyle’s recent
hit, Slumdog Millionaire (2008), from both nationalist
and transnational positions, looking closely at the
limitations and possibilities of both perspectives.
While not aiming for a theoretical solution to
the problem of “nation” within film theory, Chan’s
analysis highlights the importance of not only using
the nation as a space of resistance within a culture of
globalization, but also of not forcing films to “speak”
for one culture or country. Her piece emphasizes the
necessity for media scholars and cultural theorists to
constantly interrogate their own subject positions
and tools of analysis.
Karen Sichler critically examines the scholarly
position and methods of analysis of queer theorist
Judith Butler in “Post queerness: hyperreal gender and
the end of the quest for origins,” analyzing Butler’s
research through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s idea of
hyperreality. Sichler first goes through Baudrillard’s
different orders of hyperreality – counterfeit,
production, simulation and virtual – emphasizing
that Baudrillard’s definition of the “virtual” does not
require a referent in reality. Sichler subjects Judith
Butler’s deconstructions of gender in Gender Trouble,
Bodies that Matter and Undoing Gender to Baudrillard’s
definition of the virtual, suggesting that removing even
the idea of an “original” from Butler’s work would allow
the theorist to further challenge hierarchical structures
of gender and sexuality in her work.
POST IDENTITY
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EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
The last two essays in the issue support Sichler’s
analysis of the virtual by exploring the erasure
of specific facets of identity within new media
platforms. In “The Problem with WHOIS: Hidden
Assumptions about Identity and Social Networking,”
Rachael Sullivan examines the commonalities
between different reactions to social media such as
Facebook and Twitter, finding that most arguments
for and against social media are founded on specific
ideas about subjectivity and self-identification.
Critics of social media, argues Sullivan, assume there
is a core identity that is being somehow violated by
social media sites, but in actuality, these web sites are
merely extensions of the already fluid narratives of
identity that define postmodern society. Sullivan
uses the 1995 film The Net to portray the paranoia
that surrounds the separation of bodily and virtual
identities, as its protagonist chases after her identity
within a limbo world between personhood and nonpersonhood. Moving on to representations of new
media and identity, in “Always Already Post: On
the Machineries of Buildings and Bodies”, Amy
Falvey uses the techno-imagery of Regina Spektor’s
song, “Far,” to examine the philosophical position
of posthumanism, arguing, along the same lines
as Marcia Dawkins, that post-humanism does not
have to signify going “beyond” the human, but rather
can be a starting point for rethinking the place of
bodies within racial, cultural, political and national
boundaries and for letting go of nostalgia for “past
purity and unification.”
The issue ends with two book reviews of
recent scholarly texts that explore and problematize
sexuality in two different contexts. Joy YueZi Cheng reviews Song Hwee Lim’s Celluloid
Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in
Contemporary Chinese Cinemas, which challenges
previous categorizations of nationality and sexuality
in Chinese cinema by viewing popular Chinese
films through the lens of cultural materialism, a
combination of textual, historical, and political
analysis. Mike J. Pence reviews the collection Hetero:
Queering Representations of Whiteness, edited by Sean
Griffin, where various media scholars take a closer
look at historical and contemporary representations
of heterosexuality, queering and complicating
seemingly straightforward representations of
masculinity and femininity in popular Hollywood
cinema. These reviews provide a fitting end to a
collection that aims to rethink multiple facets of
identity in visual culture, suggesting that it is only by
interrogating the utopian nature of “post”-ness that
we can better understand identity’s past, present and
future.
Janani Subramanian is a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Critical Studies of the School of Cinematic
Arts at the University of Southern California. She earned her PhD in Critical Studies at USC. Her research
interests include representation in science fiction and fantasy films and television, identity and monstrosity,
and critical race theory. Her dissertation, Riddles of Representation in Fantastic Media, explored the use of
fantasy and the representation of identity across a variety of media platforms, including film, television and
the avant-garde. She is currently turning her dissertation into a book manuscript.
End Notes
1 Matt Bai, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?,” NYTimes.com, August 6, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/
magazine/10politics-t.html?_r=1 (accessed on February 13, 2010).
2 See Janani Subramanian, “Alienating Identification: black identity in The Brother from Another Planet and I Am Legend,” Science Fiction
Film and Television (Spring 2010).
3 “In the movie of Obama’s life, he’d pick Will Smith to star,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 26, 2008, http://www.suntimes.com/
entertainment/people/813369,obamamovies022608.article.
4 See Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000) and Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble
with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
5 See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999).
6 Alexander G. Weheliye, “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music,” Social Text 71 20.2 (2002), 22.
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